Facebook Inc (FB) is World Social King, With Exceptions

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is the dominant social-networking site in the world, listing more than 1 billion users now (or about 17 percent of the world’s population). The latest analysis of social networking in the world, however, did show that Facebook has made inroads in several new countries lately, but the site still is falling short in market share in several other areas.

Two major international powers continue to resist the progress of the Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) empire, and a prominent middle Eastern country has virtually blacked out Big Blue altogether. However, in the latest biannual report on the world online social-networking scene, Facebook continued to make slow progress in gaining market share across the globe.

In the latest report by social media analyst Vincenzo Cosenza, Facebook owns a majority of market share in 127 of the 137 countries surveyed as of December. Cosenza has produced his “world map” of social networking every six months since 2009, and the market dominance of Facebook has been dramatic. In December 2009, for example, there were 17 social networks around the world that had at least a 51-percent market share in any one country. In the December 2012 map – three short years later – there are only five dominant social networks, as Facebook has generally overtaken many of those before.

Credit: Vincenzo Cosenza, vincos.it

In the last several months, Cosenza reported, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has added Armenia, Vietnam, Latvia and Kyrgyzstan to its market empire. However, there are still a handful of countries that are resisting the advance of Facebook. Iran, for example, is dominated by Cloob, mainly because the Iranian government has all but banned Facebook from its Internet.

Two other prominent countries, Russia and China, have resisted the advance of Facebook with their own home-grown networks. In Russia, there are two that are battling for supremacy – V Kontakte and Odnoklassniki – while China’s social network market is headed by QZone. In fact, Facebook has made no ground in most of the old Soviet Union, with the exception of those three former Baltic states mentioned above.

How is Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) doing across the rest of the world?

However, while the social network sees much of its resistance in Asia, the largest share of individual users actually comes from this region, at 278 million strong (nearly 28 percent of Facebook’s worldwide user base).

Europe, meanwhile, is the second-largest FB-loving continent with 251 million users, while North America has 243 million, Cosenza reported. Brazil, Mexico and India were some of the other developing countries that Faceboook “conquered” in the last couple of years, cutting down on the number of dominant social networks worldwide.

With little progress made in the past year, has Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) reached a saturation point, or is there still room for growth? We’d love to receive your comments below.

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